On Sunday, January 27, 2002 ABC-Television brought to life another
terrifying vision from the imagination of author Stephen King. In his
original television screenplay, he introduced viewers to a haunted house
called Rose Red, a chilling mansion with dark secrets and a
bloodcurdling past. Many viewers of the mini-series will believe this is
simply another story from the mind of the master or horror... never
realizing that the story of Rose Red was inspired by a real-life
haunted house or that the locations where the movie was filmed is actually
haunted!

The six-hour miniseries centers around a house called
Rose Red, a turn-of-the-century Seattle mansion that has long been
abandoned, but according to local lore, continues to add rooms onto
itself. Intrigued by the story, a college professor named Joyce Reardon
(played by Nancy Travis) enlists a group of psychics to spend the weekend
in the house as a research project. They soon find themselves not only
face-to-face with the mansion’s restless spirits but also trapped in a
maze of rooms that constantly change locations, dead-end hallways and
stairways that lead to nowhere.

Although the house Rose Red is not real, Stephen King
has created an entire “history” for the house. The story goes that the
house once belonged to a Seattle millionaire and that his wife, Ellen
Rimbauer, haunts the mansion after being told that she would live forever
as long as construction on Rose Red was never completed.

If the story sounds somewhat familiar to ghost buffs,
there’s a reason for that. In an interview with TV Guide, King
admits that the story was inspired by the Winchester Mansion in San Jose,
California. He first saw the story of the house in one of the “Ripley’s
Believe it or Not” comics when he was a kid and remembered it for years
after. “According to ’Believe it or Not’”, King recalled, “Oliver
Winchester, who invented the famous repeating rifle that won the west,
left a daughter-in-law with a belief in Spiritualism when he went to his
reward. At one seance, Sarah Winchester asked the medium, ’When will I
die?’ .... the medium replied, ’When your house is done’.”

Author Stephen
King

As
most readers know, the Winchester house was never really completed
and construction continued on it around the clock until Sarah
Winchester died. She continued to add rooms, hallways and entire
wings, claiming to receive blueprints and ideas from the spirits on
a nightly basis. (Click Here to
see the
entire story of the Winchester House) During the preparations to
shoot Rose Red, King and a crew from the production company
actually visited the Winchester House in hopes that they might be
able to do the filming at that location. Unfortunately, they found
that most of the rooms were too small to do any creative filming
there.

After reading about the Winchester House, the story of
a “never-ending mansion” stuck with King and he thought that it might make
a good idea for a novel. He became intrigued by the idea of a house that
was actually bigger on the inside that the outside. Originally, the idea
became part of a screenplay that King started working on in conjunction
with Steven Spielberg. They wanted to make the ultimate haunted house film
or as they referred to it.. “the scariest haunted house movie ever made”.
As Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House came up several
times in the their conversations, King decided to expand upon his idea of
the never-ending house and combine it with ideas from Jackson’s novel. In
the book, a professor who is interested in the paranormal brings in a
group of psychics to investigate a haunted house. (The book was filmed in
1963 with great results as The Haunting and then again with tragic
results a few years ago by Steven Spielberg) King decided that his
professor would be more than just an academic with an interest in ghosts
and wrote his character of Joyce Reardon as a kind of “Captain Ahab”,
searching for the ultimate psychic experience rather than a white whale.

King also decided to make his ghosts more than simply
the product of the mind and turned to the classic themes of the restless
dead, and true ghost stories, to flesh out the script. The house itself
actually becomes a character in the film, taking on a monstrous life of
its own. And like Sarah Winchester’s mansion, it is never quite finished
and at one point, the characters hear the sounds of otherworldly hammering
and sawing as the house continues to build itself!

Thornewood Castle, where much of Rose Red was
filmed.
(Courtesy of Thornewood Castle)

The “Real” Rose Red

Although
filming could not be done at King’s original choice for a setting, the
Winchester House, there was apparently no shortage of ghosts at the house
that was eventually chosen to portray Rose Red in the film. Much of the
location work was down at a house called Thornewood Castle near Tacoma,
Washington. It is a real house (today used as a bed-and-breakfast) and
according to owners Deanna and Wayne Robinson, a place where the ghosts
are not just the product of Hollywood!

And this was not the first time that a Stephen King
film was shot at an actual haunted location! In 1997, ABC-Television also
premiered Stephen King’s underrated mini-series of his book The Shining.
For this production, shooting was done at the hotel that actually inspired
King’s original book, the Stanley, a stately old hotel located near Estes
Park, Colorado. In the early 1970’s, King and his wife spent the night at
the hotel thanks to bad weather. He had been working on a book idea about
a family trapped at a haunted amusement park, but it was going nowhere.
Then one day, he saw a sign in the mountains that warned of roads becoming
impassable after October because of the snow. The story of The Shining
was moved to the mythical Overlook Hotel after King checked into the
place just as it was closing down for the season. The empty hallways and
deserted guest areas inspired him to write a man who goes mad after
agreeing to act as a caretaker in a haunted hotel for the winter.

The Stanley was built in 1909 as a getaway for wealthy
Denver socialites and according to local lore and staff members of the
place, a few of these former guests have apparently never checked out!
Tales were told not only by hotel workers but also by cast and crew
members for the ABC production about doorknobs that turned by themselves,
doors that opened and closed, phantom footsteps and even mysterious sounds
that occasionally interrupted the filming.

Director Mick Garris later recalled: “One of our
costume people went to bed one night. Five minutes after he hit the sack,
something sat down on the bed next to him.” And the star of the film,
Steven Weber, who played Jack Torrance, also heard a number of strange
stories from the crew. “When you have big, beefy grips come down too
breakfast and say, ‘Man, something walked through me last night!’”,
he said, “you know they are not kidding!”

And Thornewood Castle, which became Rose Red for the
new film, apparently has stories of its own. The English Tudor,
gothic-style mansion was built in 1911 for Chester Thorne, one of the
founders of Tacoma. He was fascinated with the grandeur of the old English
estate and decided to recreate it in the Pacific Northwest. It took three
years to complete and was constructed from concrete, brick and steel. Many
of the materials, including the brick, oak paneling, an oak staircase and
even stained glass were imported from an actual castle in Europe. The
artifacts traveled by ship around Cape Horn and then up the coast to
Tacoma. The cost of construction for the house in 1911 was around $1
million and would be 30 times that amount today.

Over the years, the house has collected its own
supernatural lore. While there is no word of ghostly happenings during the
filming of the movie, there have long been stories of brides-to-be who
claim to see the apparition of a woman in a mirror as they prepare for
their wedding. Staff members have also felt presences and have gotten
their own glimpses of the spectral inhabitants.

Did the real-life inspirations for the film create a
ghostly ambience that makes Rose Red “the scariest haunted house
movie ever made”? We’ll let the viewer and reader judge that for
themselves but we do hope that you’ll take note of art once again
imitating life in this new take on haunted houses. Truth, as they say, is
often even stranger (and sometimes more frightening) than fiction!